Recent content by strahmhv

What gives root beer its darker color? I made my first batch and its very light in color. Used dark brown sugar and honey as the sugars... would molasses darken it? Tastes great otherwise

Tettnang will be just fine, this is an amber recipe where the malts are showcased. Differences in hops are very difficult to detect at these levels of IBUs. The hops are more a balancing mechanism than flavor component... Im sure youll make a delicious beer with what you have. :)

Ouch, youd be better off letting the mash go longer while you heated the sparge water up. Next time :) Calculating sparge water more precisely, and heating it more got me over 80% eff. I now heat the sparge water to 180 and the mash bed still doesnt get above 165.

Your fine, its all going to re ferment anyways. As long as you got the yeast woken up and a bit of growth it should do the trick. Some strains take longer to do their thing.

Brew Like a Monk is a great book on Belgian Ales, and the author explains how many of the brewers will rack bigger beers and add new yeast twice, sometimes three times. In some cases more fermentable are added, other times just yeast... occasionally a different strain. I'd wait a week and...

Also have been using corn sugar, but I suppose any fermentable sugar would do fine. It's a fraction of your total fermentables

From what ive heard most of the conversion is done in the first 10 mins of the mash. Like you said... probably just expect a drier beer as long as the yeast can handle the alc% (assuming its a big beer). Wouldnt worry if you hit the OG

1.4 Bittering to Gravity ratio. Is that what your going for? As far as the fruitiness goes i believe you would only need to change your mid/late hop additions and lower fermentation temp.

The yeast is what makes a hef a hef. For most other beers you can get away with using us05 dry yeast or nottingham, but not hefs or belgians. You can mix the yeast back into suspension to cloud it up if you like, but for your next batch id recommend some WL300 hef yeast.

This. Now that I have a family, my friends and I typically double batch and bbq... make a day of it. Last sunday we brewed 2, bottled 2, and cooked some burgers over 8 hrs but it got pretty hectic. Id much rather relax, brew a batch over 6 hours and enjoy a couple beers :)

Most homebrew stores have products called "5.2 stabilizers" that are pretty broad buffers but if you want to manually adjust it, many people have success with lactic acid

Alright, thanks for the help. Ive added water pre boil alot to adjust to desired boil gravity. But i can see how adding it post boil would be different

Because fermenter volume is finite

Ive been considering trying a couple different ways of dry hopping to minimize the loss in volume. 1. Make a hop tea, let it rest and settle a few days, and add the liquid to the secondary. 2. Make a bigger beer (higher abv, IBU) dry hop it, and then add sterilized water to dillute it down...

Just curious as to whether the red wheat we use has been malted or not?